Dorothea Lange was an American photographer and she was very well known for documenting the lives of immigrants during times of economic hardship and societal injustice. Dorothea Lange used her camera to make hidden pain visible and to remind people that policies and statistics are really about human beings. I believe this is shown best in Grab a Hunk of Lightning (Taylor, 2014), where Lange herself said her job was to “make visible what’s invisible.” Lange cared deeply about the suffering of people and felt a responsibility to show the truth. She believed her photography could reveal things that reports and numbers couldn’t. Her work wasn’t just about taking pictures, it was about giving a voice to those who were ignored. Her goal was to show the injustice that she saw to those who could not see it for themselves. Through her lens, ordinary moments became proof of strength and struggle, meant to make people care and push for change.
After looking through the catalog, I picked the image which shows a Japanese American family inside a cramped barrack at the Manzanar internment camp in 1942. A woman holds her child near a fabric partition while two men sit on the floor beside a miniature stove (Lange, 1942). The image creates a sense of emptiness, the family residing in the space has made it a home, even if only temporarily. Lange took this photograph to share the injustice these people were seeing, which would otherwise have been ignored as nothing more than a statistic. She wanted this photo to humanize those affected by government policies and social inequality. The familys calm presence contrasts with the harsh, empty room around them. The thin curtain and bare walls show how much privacy and freedom they’ve lost, but Lange’s framing also lets us see their quiet resistance, not just their pain.
Lange, Dorothea. War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942-1945 circa 1941-1947. Https://Digicoll.Lib.Berkeley.Edu/Record/110485?V=uv#?xywh=65%2C32%2C1279%2C925&cv=.
Taylor, D. (Director). (2014). Grab a hunk of lightning [Documentary film]. PBS American Masters.
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